


the missing pills

by scorpiusismypatronus



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: 13rw bashing ig?, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anorexia, Bulimia, CSA, Child on Child Sexual Abuse, Childhood Trauma, EDNOS, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Fainting, Flashbacks, Graphic Self Harm, Homophobia, I love italics too much sorry, I'm fine tho guys! dw, Implied Non-Con, Oh!!, PTSD, Pre-Canon, Repressed Memories, Self Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Vomiting, backstory fic, believe it or not this actually helps me?????jkdfhgjhdflkj, child sexual assault, cocsa, conversion therapy, exercise bulimia, hm if i missed smth tell me;;, homophobic parents, i guess??, i havent met her, idk prbly not good in the long run but whatever, junior year Connor is a lot like senior year Alana actually, no I'm not kidding please don’t read if it’s going to hurt u, non-con, non-graphic descriptions of rape, religion-based homophobia, sorry I just Don't Like, the missing pills from the medicine cabinet / the missing kid found passed out in the park, this gon be me in a few years, uh if u read the tags on my recent sumt fic uhh the thing that happened directly inspired this, unsupportive parents, vent fic, what the hell is a 'coping mechanism', yeah mood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-03-03 22:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13350807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiusismypatronus/pseuds/scorpiusismypatronus
Summary: Basically, an AU where Connor was sexually abused as a child and how it affected him later in lifethe tw's are in the tags and there's a lot??





	the missing pills

Connor was seven when it happened. His cousins on his mom’s side were staying over. Zoe stayed with Amélie and Lacey, and Connor stayed with Raine.

Raine was a ten-year-old girl with tanned skin and long, brown hair. She would have stayed with Zoe and Amélie and Lacey, but she was nine, and the other girls were six, five, and five respectively — way too young for Raine to play with. No, Raine wanted to play with _Connor_.

It started with Raine saying, “Connor, do you want to play a game?”

When Connor hesitated, she said, “A secret game. For just the two of us.”

“What’s the game?” He asked. What seven-year-old could resist a secret game?

“It’s called hug-tackle. You hug someone and whoever falls over first loses. And if you don’t win, you get a punishment!”

“Okay?”

“All right. Ready, set, go!”

The girl, being much bigger than him, had him pinned down in a second. She giggled and pushed his hair out of his face. “Now you get a punishment!”

“What is it?” Connor asked, giggling. Maybe she’d try to take his DS, in which case he’d take it right back. She couldn’t do anything _bad_ to him! He was seven!

“You’ll see,” she said, forcing Connor’s small arms out of his shirt and pulling it off his head. 

“Why are you doing that?” Connor asked.

“Don’t worry. You’ll like it! It’ll be our secret game!”

When she started trying to take off his shorts, he struggled. “You can’t do that! I don’t want you to.”

“But you have to get a punishment!” Raine whined.

“I don’t like this game,” pouted Connor, but he stopped fighting, because she was three years older than him and he couldn’t fight back.

The girl stuck her hands inside his boxers. “Don’t WORRY so much, Connor! This will make you feel good!”

(It did not make him feel good.)

 

—

 

He was nine years old the next time he saw Raine. He’d not remembered what had happened — had shoved it down deep inside his chest to a place where he wouldn’t have to think about it.

But when he saw her, it all came back. 

He ran out of the room, ignoring his mom calling him, and slammed open the bathroom door, falling down on the floor. He felt bile rise in his stomach. He turned to the toilet and threw up.

 

—

 

It had all happened in the bedroom down the hall from where his mom slept. He had been dirtied and tainted in the room across from the bathroom, where he knelt by the toilet, crying so hard he couldn’t breathe.

Why couldn’t he remember this? What was _wrong_ with him?

He was just making this up. Yes, that’s what had to be happening. He was making this up for the attention.

Things like this didn’t happen to boys like him. This only happened to grown-up women. Not little boys.

He couldn’t even think the word.

 

—

 

The family reunion was a disaster and he couldn’t tell anyone why. From the second he saw Raine, he was shifting rapidly from the mental state of a nine-year-old to a seven-year-old. Forgetting what had happened and then remembering it so vividly he felt like throwing up again. He didn’t know what to do or what he was thinking and it was terrifying. Why wouldn’t it be?

So he hid in his room. His room which had been ruined just like him.

And he waited it out until it was time for her to leave.

 

—

 

“Connor, it’s time for dinner!” Zoe called.

“Gimme a moment,” Connor called back, closing his computer and sighing. He’d been trying to figure out why there was a blank space in his memory, why he’d thrown up at the sight of Raine — he’d forgotten it all again. 

Repression.

PTSD.

Clinical depression.

Self harm.

Suicide.

Child sexual abuse.

They were things he hadn’t known about. Things he shouldn’t have had to know about.

And yet, here he was.

 

—

 

His first year of middle school coincided with Raine’s last year. The first time he saw her in the halls, he ran, shaking, to the bathroom, where he emptied the contents of his stomach and sobbed, pulling at his hair, trying to figure out what was _wrong_ with him.

“Some fucking kid crying in here—“ he heard someone say.

“Pussy,” he heard another.

“Anyway, so this fucker came up to me like, ‘what’s…”

Connor tuned it all out. He tuned everything out. He couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t take any of this.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve and checked the time on his phone. 11:30. Class would start in five minutes.

He couldn’t go to class. He still felt like he would throw up. He stayed in that bathroom stall for half an hour before going to the nurse’s office.

Connor didn’t show up to the rest of his classes that day.

He called in sick the rest of the week.

He was so broken.

 

—

 

His twelfth year wasn’t a good one. It was riddled with panic attacks and suicidal thoughts, with flashbacks and memory loss.

He dug a blade into his arm for the first time that January, not crying or afraid because he couldn’t feel anything anymore.

He stopped eating, slowly at first, because he wanted to lose weight, to be a little skinnier, to have _one fucking thing_ under control, and then it was because he wasn’t hungry, and then every time he was faced with food he’d have a panic attack so he tried to just stay away from it.

—

Eighth grade brought him trips to clinics and hospitals and therapists because his mom thought he was “angry and depressed.”

Which he _was_. He was angry at the injustice in the world and with Raine and with his trauma and reactions to it. He was depressed and angry and hurting and he needed someone to see and help him but no one ever did and he began to isolate himself.

But his mom never thought to inquire as to why.

(He didn’t tell any of the therapists what had happened with Raine. They didn’t ask.)

—

Freshman year found him starving again because his body was dirty and gross and no one would want to be with him if they knew but if they didn’t they should be able to want to. 

He tried to kill himself that May, with the pills in the cabinet.

All it did was fuck him up the next day and make his father say the words that stuck with him until he killed himself: “ _it’s just for the attention_.”

He knew he was a horrible person for taking it all out on Zoe but what else could he do? The other option was killing himself and apparently that was “just for the attention.”

—

His dad found out he was gay in his sophomore year and did everything he could to “fix” his son, including pulling him out of school, taking away his phone, and isolating him. 

It was a familiar story to him. He’d read too many articles on Leelah Alcorn’s death. 

He was sent to conversion therapy that December and came back three weeks later, his newest scars on his thighs so the people — _demons_ — there wouldn’t see.

His parents sent him back to school in February because they figured their bullshit prayers had worked.

It was too much for him. Someone would so much as brush against him, or he’d feel a slight heat, and he was right back there at the camp. He lost it when he was walking down the stairs and the metal rod of the handrail and it shocked him.

But oh god, it was worst with Zoe. Something about the girl reminded him of the head leader. Every time he saw her out of the corner of his eye or smelt her perfume he had to _fight_ , he had to get _out_ , and a small logical part of him knew _this is Zoe_ , this is your _sister_ , you used to look for four-leaf clovers at the park with her and you helped her dye her hair.

But so much of him was screaming _LET ME GO GET ME OUT DON’T HURT ME_ and he needed to _run_.

He tried killing himself three times that year. The first during the therapy, two weeks in, he tried eating a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup — he was allergic to them and he knew it — but all that happened was he got a shot and very irritated looks from the counsellors. They didn’t know it was intentional. Of course they didn’t. They didn’t care about him.

The second time was in March, when he filled up the bathtub with water in a 13-Reasons-Why-esque scene and sliced his wrists open, diving under the water, tears dry on his cheeks. 

He began to fade from consciousness a minute or two in but he was _so fucking weak_ and he had to float up and choke down some air and his feelings of worthlessness for a while.

The third time was in June. He took a handful of sleeping pills and tied a bag over his head.

Of course he chose the bag with a fucking hole in it. God, he couldn’t even kill himself correctly. 

—

He didn’t sleep for a week because he was studying for the SATs and he passed with a 1570; one of the top scores in his school.

He threw himself entirely into his academics. Every moment he didn't spend studying he was either asleep or getting fucking wasted to forget about everything.

By November, Connor found himself with straight As — if only his parents knew that was the only straight part of him.

He worked himself to the bone. The only thing he could bring himself to care about was school. He stopped eating because he kept forgetting, stopped showering because he was studying, stopped sleeping because he got sucked into his Geometry textbook.

Connor supposed it was another form of self harm. Basing his self-worth on a bunch of stupid tests. Staying up all night and focusing on only one thing.

But once he started he couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t. Everyone was so _proud_ of him for once. It had been three weeks since his last detention and five since he last threw a fit at Zoe. It had only been a few days since he last cut, but he was getting better, right?

No. No he was not. He passed out in the hallway on a Thursday in February and found himself in the nurses’ office, where tests stated he hadn’t eaten in 72 hours — had it really been that long? — and that he’d passed out due to fatigue.

After that he couldn’t focus. His teachers were disappointed. His parents were disappointed. He was disappointed. But he could barely stare at a book for five minutes before feeling the self-loathing set in.

His grades dropped to Cs and Ds by late March. Where he now shone was the track.

He never went to meets, but he was at every practice and often showed up to school early to run. And run. And run. Of course he had to jog in a hoodie to hide his scars, but it was worth it. And besides, being warm would help him burn more fat, wouldn’t it?

He didn’t talk to anyone on the team if he could get away with it. One kid, a Jared something, never left him alone about wearing baggy hoodies and not showing up to meets, but Connor just ignored him, staring off into the distance until he left.

He would run for two, three, four hours every day. He didn’t notice the addiction until it was late. He was running after every meal he ate at first, but then if he didn't run after eating anything, even just one gummy bear, he’d go throw up.

He felt _horrible_.

—

Summer kicked his ass and he wrote out forty suicide notes, deleting them or erasing them or burning them before anyone could see. His first day back Jared from track called him a freak and some kid, Elliot or Evan or Eddie, laughed at him, and he became irrationally angry, shoving the kid to the ground, marching past, even though he knew he was overreacting.

He ran into the kid later that day, and signed his cast, because he was so _anxious_ and it made Connor curious as to why.

He shouldn’t have been curious.

The fucker had been writing about his sister. His Zoe. And sure he hadn’t had a real conversation with her in over a year, but _she was his sister_. She was someone who deserved respect, not some creepy senior writing love letters to her.

—

He couldn’t handle the constant fighting.

He couldn’t live with it.

He couldn’t survive this.

—

He couldn’t

—

He was weak and he was stupid and he was so tired and

—

And they’d just gotten a refill on medicines.

—

He snuck into the bathroom and grabbed a water bottle, tossing a few pills back, washing them down, repeating. He slid his feet into his shoes and stepped outside, the night air cold on his face.

He kept taking the pills until they were all gone and then let the bottle fall.

He took off running for the park.

—

He didn't know why

He just had to go there

—

It was so peaceful, Ellison State Park, with its tall trees and the night sky and the full moon.

—

He leaned against a tree.

—

He drank the rest of his water.

—

And he waited.


End file.
